Bright Midnight: A Second-Chance Romance Read online

  I bring out my journal to distract me, wondering if Anders still writes in his. The poetry he would scribble down day-in and day-out still sticks with me to this day.

  Stop that, I tell myself. There is no past, only now.

  The door chime goes off, echoing across the shop.

  I look up.

  Anders walks in, immediately spotting me, his dark eyes meeting mine. I swear our pupils must be magnetized because when he holds me in his stare, I’m powerless to look away.

  My heart jumps as he walks forward with his large frame, moving between the tables with ease, and I’m reminded of a time in Capri, climbing to the top of a bunch of smooth, high rocks and balancing for a heady moment, just me and the air and the sea, before diving straight down.

  It’s that feeling of the unknown.

  The freedom.

  Then the fall.

  Oh my god. This man is going to break me all over again.

  But I can’t run. I want to, more than anything. I can’t run from my past any more than I can run to it. Because my past is coming to me.

  “Hi there,” he says to me, voice like cream. That accent is always icing on the cake.

  “Hi,” I say, staring up at him. I smile.

  He smiles back. Close-lipped and just a bit wicked. It’s almost a relief to see after the confused and brooding way he was last night.

  “I was thinking,” I tell him as I get to my feet, pressing my hands down on the table. “That maybe we ought to start over.”

  He cocks his head and a lock of his tousled hair falls across his forehead. “Start over?”

  “Pretend we are meeting for the first time. Today. Right now.”

  He frowns, shoving his hands into the pockets of his deep green rain jacket. “Erase the past.”

  I shrug. “Maybe not erase it. Just…forget it, for now.” I rub my lips together, wincing slightly. “Please. I think it will help.”

  Please don’t make me explain why. You should know why.

  He nods, looking away for a moment before looking back and holding out his hand. “Anders Johansen. I’m your driver today, taking you to the long-forgotten town of Todalen. We are famous for hiking and our potato dumplings.”

  I place my hand in his and just like last night, that hot thrill runs from my palm and through the rest of my body. “Shay Lavji. Brooklyn, New York. Famous for our beer and irony.”

  “Nice you meet you, Shay.”

  “Nice to meet you, Anders,” I tell him. I can’t help but smile at him all and when I do, something in his eyes lights up. “Thank you for coming to get me.”

  “Anytime,” he says, letting go and picking up my backpack, swinging it over his shoulder. “Are you ready to go?”

  I tell him yes and am about to grab my duffel bag when he grabs that too. I thank him as he strides away, and I follow him out of the café. My view of him from behind isn’t too bad—blue jeans and work boots—though I find myself wishing that his rain jacket didn’t cover his ass the way it is. I need a good look at that thing. You know, for comparison’s sake.

  Today it’s overcast, with a light wind that jostles the branches of budding trees, but at least it’s not raining. To my surprise, he leads me to a vintage red sportscar.

  “Is this yours?” I ask, staring at the gorgeous car.

  “It is,” he says proudly, opening the hatch and throwing my bags in. “The VW belongs to my uncle, but this baby is all mine.”

  “What kind of car is it?”

  “A Datsun. Only the best for these roads. You can’t really fit more than two people in it, so I hope you don’t mind a tight squeeze.” Mind? My stomach gets all frothy thinking about being alone with him in the car for what seems to be a long drive.

  He opens the passenger door for me. “After you,” he says.

  Even as a teenager, at the heart of all that rebellion, he still had manners.

  Stop that, I chide myself. Start over.

  “Thank you,” I tell him, getting in.

  “So what did you do last night after the bar?” he asks as he brings the car down the road, the wheels bouncing over the cobblestones.

  “Stayed in my room,” I tell him, staring out the window and watching all the people going to and fro this afternoon. Normally I would be marveling at it all, the foreignness, the newness, and start wondering what it would be like to live in this city. But Anders beside me, those large hands on the steering wheel, our close proximity, is beyond distracting. Instead of being a real traveler and concentrating on the world around me, my mind keeps swinging back to the world within the car, like a pendulum.

  “You didn’t even go back out?” he asks incredulously. “What did you do for dinner?”

  I give him a sheepish look. “I ate all the candy your sisters got me.”

  He rolls his eyes and smirks. “Well, I’ll tell you what, as soon as we get into Todalen I’ll take you to the one and only restaurant. I hope you like potato dumplings, because that’s all they have.”

  “One thing on the menu? How modern.”

  “Don’t knock it till you try it.”

  I have to admit, my stomach is rumbling at the thought.

  “As long as it’s not covered in herring, I’ll be okay,” I tell him. Half-joking, because ew.

  “What happened to the adventurous eater who liked to try everything?” he asks, chuckling softly. “Remember that time we went out for sushi and you ate the…what was it, sea urchin?”

  I smile at him tightly.

  “Oh sorry,” he says, dark brows drawn together. “I forgot. Don’t mention the past.” His knuckles clench the wheel for a moment before relaxing. “Anyway, I guess I should show you the Trondheim cathedral while we’re here.”

  He takes me down a narrow street lined with trees and cafes where people are trying to soak up the weak sunshine. Across from the street is a giant, gothic, almost frightening looking cathedral that dwarfs the picnickers relaxing on the expansive lawn below.

  “Our most famous medieval church, the Nidaros Cathedral,” he explains as he pulls into a parking space. “Oldest one in Scandinavia, too.”

  We get out of the car and walk around, peering up at the copper-roofed spires, now a milky green, feeling the watch of gargoyles and faces carved into doorways. It’s gorgeous and eerie at the same time, and I take a moment to soak it in and wonder how the hell this thing was built so many centuries ago.

  “Want to go inside?” I ask him as we pause by the giant front doors. You can smell the musty pews inside and the herbal quality of so many offerings coming through from the darkened interior.

  He shakes his head. “I’ve been judged enough,” he says, shoving his hands in his pockets.

  I give him a curious look but he doesn’t go on. I don’t remember the teenage Anders having any problems with churches or religion. But then again, there was a lot—too much—I didn’t know about him.

  I finish taking a few photos with my phone, focusing on the stone statues carved into the front, before we head back to the Datsun and make our way out of the city, heading past suburbs and strip malls that remind me of home. If home was brightly colored with that tidy, modern Scandinavian slant.

  We’re silent for most of the drive, which I don’t mind. And for whatever reason, the silence isn’t awkward at all, it’s comfortable.

  For once it allows me to focus on the journey, and even though I’m aware of Anders’ presence at all times, I feel my mind wandering blissfully. We pass through tiny towns, villages, settlements. The valleys are so lush and green it hurts my eyes, the mountains and forests rising up behind red barns and white farmhouses. Everywhere you look is a photograph waiting to happen, and when I roll down the window, the air smells like hay and grass and life being born again.

  I close my eyes, smile, feeling the sun on my face and the sweet wind in my hair and I think, I’m happy.

  The thought almost comes as a shock. I can’t remember the last time I really felt it.

 
Or maybe the moments have been too far between. That’s the thing about happiness. It comes and goes. There are moments of being happy, experiencing it purely, followed by moments of just being. There’s nothing wrong with being either, putting one foot in front of the other, air in and air out.

  But the world makes you think you need to feel happy all the time. I don’t think that’s possible, at least not with me. Maybe true happiness is having moments like this and finding a way to hold onto them for as long as you can. Maybe happiness should be rationed, and when you run out, you need to create your own happiness to fill the gaps.

  “What are you thinking about?” Anders silken voice slides into my thoughts.

  I keep my eyes closed, the sun on my face. I should have known he’d be watching me. He always had that way about him. I guess that’s the poet in him. Always watching, always observing. Even when he should be watching the road.

  I hesitate for a moment, not sure how deep I want to get with him. “Happiness.”

  He mulls that over.

  “And what are your thoughts about it?” he asks curiously.

  I look back out the window at the passing mountains. “I think it’s a myth that people can and should be happy all the time.”

  “I agree.”

  “I think it’s an emotion that comes and goes.”

  “Like the tide. It comes in but it will always go back out. That doesn’t make it good or bad. It just is. It’s life.”

  “Yeah.” I turn my head over to look at him. He has his wayfarers over his eyes now so I can’t see his expression, though he is chewing on his lower lip in such a way that makes me want to chew on it too. I look back to the road and clear the image from my head. “Personally, when I think back to the moments where I was really happy, you know, when you’re just floating and you can’t stop smiling and you want to drop everything and do a little dance, it’s usually because some event has specifically happened to you. You’re not waking up like that every day because life is just that damn good, unless you happen to be some crazy lucky person where those events just keep piling up, one after another.”

  “It sounds exhausting.”

  “It would be. The happiness pile-up.”

  “Some might call that falling in love though,” he says, so casually that I’m starting to believe he’s truly forgotten the past. “You know. Every day is just another pile-up until it gets too overwhelming, you can’t even move.”

  Sounds pretty accurate, I think. “And then what do you do? Wait for rescue?” I ask softly.

  “You get out,” he says simply.

  And he got out all right. Without a single scratch to him, leaving me alone in the burning wreckage, leaving me to crawl out on my own.

  That’s love for you.

  “Unless you’re Pharell,” Anders quickly adds. “He’s got that ‘Happy’ thing going for him.” He glances at me, shoulders seeming to lift, brow softening. “So, how are…tell me about your family,” he says, playing along. “Do you have any sisters or brothers?”

  I’m still smarting from his remark about love, but I’m grateful for the distraction, that he’s pretending to not know anything about my family when he does. “One sister, Hannah. She’s older and a pain in the ass. Do you remember…well, no you wouldn’t. In America we have these books called the Baby-Sitters Club Series and I used to be obsessed with them when I was little. There were hundreds of them, all written by ghost writers, something I learned recently that totally ruined my world, but anyway, one of the characters, Claudia, she had this older sister Janine. This complete nerd and not in the cute nerd girl way. She rarely smiled, didn’t seem to have a sense of humor, and spent all her days studying. She was supposed to be this genius, even though she was only fifteen and was pretty much the opposite of Claudia in every way.” I pause and take a breath, even though Anders already knows everything I’m telling him. “Well, that’s Hannah to a tee. Who knew I’d be able to relate to a ghost-written fictional character so well? Now she’s in college, getting her PhD already in some science sector I don’t understand, and lives with some older man in Boston.”

  “Doesn’t sound like an easy person to relate to,” Anders comments.

  I shake my head. “She’s not. We’ve got better since…well, over the years. But considering she was like my substitute mom throughout most of high school, you’d think we’d be closer somehow.”

  “It doesn’t work that way with family,” he says. “Blood doesn’t bring you closer any more than distance does. I should know.”

  I watch him. That grip on the steering wheel, the sparrow growing distorted and pale. “Oh yeah?”

  He nods but presses his lips together and doesn’t continue. He’s always been that way. Getting information out of him was nearly impossible. Sure, he could recite you poetry or some wordy confession, but it had to come from him. You could never get it out of him on your own. He gave you what you wanted only when he decided to. It explains why throughout the eight months of us dating, he still remained a mystery to me.

  To my surprise, he continues. “My father and I…before I was sent to America, my father brought me on board for a two-week fishing trip. At the time we weren’t doing so well. Our relationship, I mean. When my mother left us, we all took it hard and we all had to do what we had to do. Even if it wasn’t what we wanted.”

  He licks his lips and gets a faraway look in his eyes. The air between us grows heavy and I think that maybe he’s done talking. “Anyway, I know what my dad was trying to do. To make me see how he made a living. To make me understand. The hardships, the sacrifices. All those things you don’t give a shit about when you’re young, not until you’re older and it’s too late. I didn’t appreciate it. I didn’t bond with him. All it did was make things worse. We even fought one night and…” he trails off. Gives a quick shake of his head. “It doesn’t matter. Blood or not, relationships can’t be forced. More than that, empathy can’t be forced. Understanding. You know?”

  I nod. “I know.”

  We drive in silence for a few more moments, before taking a turn-off that leads between towering mountains, their peaks bald with rock and alpine shrub. They look like monks, deep in meditation, on their own eternal quest for happiness.

  “Are you happy?” I find myself asking him.

  He gives me a quick glance. “Such serious topics for people who have only just met.”

  I smile expectantly and stare at him for an answer.

  He looks back to the road, momentarily biting his lip in thought. “No.”

  I don’t know why I’m surprised, considering what we just talked about. “Not even sometimes?”

  “Oh, everyone is happy sometimes. Just like you said. But when those sometimes are few and far between, I think no is the only answer.” He glances at me again. “I can tell you I was happy this morning.”

  “You were?”

  “I saw your message on Facebook. That made me happy.”

  I look away, busying myself with the scenery. “Oh,” I say. I’m not sure how I feel about that, but my cheeks grow hot.

  Soon we’re heading through tunnels until the world to the right of me opens up and we’re coasting along an absolute fairy-tale.

  Holy shit. It’s even more beautiful than I could have ever imagined.

  “Welcome to Todalen,” Anders says, pulling to small look-out point on the side of the road.

  I get out and am immediately overwhelmed by it all. Behind us are the steep, forested mountains that come crashing down to our feet, the narrow road snaking along the base and into a picturesque valley. In front of us are more mountains with snow-dusted caps that seem to rise straight out of the blue sea like an ancient jawbone. In the space between us and the land, gulls dance above a small fishing boat cutting through the water.

  “Wow,” I say, sitting down on a bolder at the edge of the cliff, a sharp path below leading down a few feet to the deep water. “It’s stunning.”

  “Ja,” he says, sta
nding beside me, hands on hips. “I must say, whenever I come back home it’s nice to have this view greeting me.”

  The sun feels stronger here and I’m quickly shedding my sweater and holding out my arms, trying to soak up the sun while I can. “I don’t think I’ve felt the sun since I left Italy.”

  “I bet you have a lot of stories about that place,” he says, grinning down at me. “A girl like you.”

  I glance up at him, wincing from the sun in my eyes. “A girl like me?”

  He just nods. “Come on.” And he goes around the car, getting back in.

  Honestly I could just sit here forever, holding on to happiness, but I get up, dusting off my ass, and hop back in.

  The engine revs and with a quick smile from Anders, we take off.

  8

  Anders

  Loneliness is a ragged dog

  howling at your door

  It haunts you

  Sinks in your bones

  Because you know these dogs are everywhere

  Waiting outside everyone’s door

  Crying, whimpering, shaking

  Begging to be let inside

  It’s okay to let them in once

  Let them sniff around

  Piss on your heart

  Curl up at the foot of your soul

  But always let them out in the morning

  And never, ever feed them.

  I have to pinch myself.

  My fingers cutting into the palm of my hand should do the trick.

  But there are no tricks to make this all seem real.

  This impossible reality.

  Shay Lavji is sitting across from me in the restaurant, delicately sipping a glass of water and trying hard not to stare at all the people and the sights around her, just as the people are trying hard not to stare at her. It’s all locals—seniors mostly—in this place and rarely do we have anyone that looks like Shay.